The Desert Mermaid

• Clarence “Ducky” Nash not only voiced Donald Duck in English; he also did the voice on all the dubbed shorts Disney made so that the voice would remain consistently unintelligible across all languages.
• Before she became a TV cook show hostess, Julia Child INVENTED SHARK REPELLENT.
• Shakira sings very differently in English than she does in Spanish—to an amazing degree. In English, she sounds like so many other Madonna clones; in Spanish she’s got that rich and confident voice. I’d never listened to one of her songs’ English and Spanish versions back-to-back before, but it’s amazing how different it is.
• Drawing something that looks like text without being legible is called “Greeking”—the written equivalent of “rhubarb.”
• Generally speaking, the human brain can only really count up to 4 at a glance. Numbers beyond that slow us down.
• Cookie Monster’s name in Hindu Hindi is Biscuit Badsha.
• BONUS EDIT WITH NEW LEARNED THING: Hindi is the language; Hindu is the religion.  I never was really sure of the difference in the terms.  Thanks, sriti !
• It’s incredibly convenient to have a portable musical instrument to carry around and practice when you’ve got a few minutes, instead of having something too huge to lug around.
• There is an explanation for my complete inability to ever adhere to the crazy raw food diet so many of our library patrons seem to be interested in starting up: Oral Allergy Syndrome. (I’m sure those raw food books would assure me that I wouldn’t have this syndrome if I just ate enough raw food to detox, but fuck ’em.)
• You can get hives ON YOUR GOD DAMN EYEBALL.
• There are a few drawbacks to nuclear power. [/understatement]
• Mushrooms grow fast.
• Calendars generally follow three main types: lunar, solar, and lunisolar.  A great deal of work goes into keeping calendars on track, especially the lunisolar ones.  Some calendars also have a really complex way to make the weekdays dependent on the date and even more complex astrological positions.
• The term for the shaved head, or part of the head, of a monk is tonsure.
• It is possible for me to find stars in the sky if I concentrate!
• Also, Betelgeuse really does look orange.
• The effectiveness of toilet paper follows a bell curve along its price range. Too cheap and it’s painful and thin; too expensive and it’s so pumped with lotions, layers, and moisturizers that it forgets its function as, well, toilet paper, and winds up just waving at your butt as it goes by.
• There are Geno fans on the internet. I should have known.
• Pizza sauce is a lot simpler than I thought, but crust is still a bit tough to work out.

There are all sorts of reasons why I’m a language nerd.  There’s the anthropological aspect, for starters—what a language says about its speakers, and what they feel is important to say.  There’s the technical aspect—how we encode information. There’s the aesthetic aspect, an appreciation for the sounds and shapes in a language.

But I gotta admit, all that pales next to that “BOOYEAH” feeling you get when somebody says something in another language and you understand it.

Yeah, I fielded a call in Spanish today.  I kick ass.

• When I first saw El Hombre Pálido, the Pale Man, in the previews, I recognized the actor playing him (and, I found out later, also El Fauno) from the movement of his hands. It is a contortionist named Doug Jones, swathed in makeup, and the movie I recognized him from is Hellboy, where he is—get ready—swathed in makeup as Abe Sapiens. How did I know who he was if I have never seen his face? Simple: Jones has a very theatrical and beautful way of moving his hands, so that somebody like me who can barely recognize faces could spot this.
• El Fauno’s digitigrade legs are not CG—or, rather the only CG was green screen technology. I DID NOT KNOW THIS, AND IT IS AWESOME.
• If you keep an eye on the book when Ofelia asks it what happens next, you will see that it gives you an extra splotchy image hint just before it gets washed out. Of course, eighteen seconds later you won’t need the hint because the next in her question turns out to be very next, but you get to feel smug for noticing it.
• I watched the subtitled version, which is the only way to watch anything.* And I think—I think—that El Fauno uses a more archaic register of Spanish than everyone else in the film. It was hard to tell with the Barthelona acthent, but I think he used a form of you, vos, that in older Spanish was a more formal version, although in dialects where it’s still spoken it’s now the less formal version. Since nobody else in the film uses it, and El Fauno is in the old country and is old himself, I’m gussing the idea was to make him sound old and fancy. Those of you who don’t speak Spanish wouldn’t catch that in the subtitles, and I thought you’d be interested in that subtle bit of awesome.